Critical Essay by Yumna Siddiqi

In the essay below, Siddiqi considers the treatment of gender and race in two court masques by Ben Jonson and a masque written for London merchants by Thomas Middleton.

Colonial discourse is characterized by its capacity to harness a rhetoric of difference—construed in terms of race, culture, and morality—for a project of domination. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, Britain had but begun to colonize other territories. The rhetoric that underpinned its early colonizing ventures was not yet a fully developed discourse. However, even in its early moments, what one might call the protocolonial discourse of the period imaginatively constituted non-Europeans so as to legitimate British intervention and rule. This discursive...